They have become brilliant at chess, had music performed by one of the world’s leading orchestras and seen their art enter major collections. But could a computer also generate a hit West End musical?
The answer may be provided next year with the announcement of the world’s first computer musical, getting a run at the Arts Theatre accompanied by a TV series on Sky Arts.
“It is a mad experiment,” said producer Catherine Gale, who has been coordinating the project for the last year. “No one has ever done it before and we really didn’t know what was going to happen when we started.”
It will be a machine-generated musical but there will, of course, be a lot of humans involved. “This is not about taking humans out of the creative process at all,” said Gale.
The experiment began with with a data analysis of success in musical theatre by researchers from the Machine Learning Group at Cambridge University. They investigated different aspects including cast size, emotional structure, and backdrop. They asked whether the most successful musicals always had romance or death. Or both.
Next the team from Wingspan Productions visited a research project at Goldsmiths, University of London, called the What-If Machine. The project is all about how to engineer software that takes some of the creative responsibility in arts and science projects, and in this case the machine presented multiple central premises and key characters.
A plot structure for the show was also generated computationally with Dr Pablo Gervás, from the Complutense University of Madrid, using a computer system called PropperWryter to build a core narrative arc.
The music has been provided by computer music researcher Nick Collins, a reader at Durham University, who is the co-inventor the alogorave, an event where people gather to dance to music created by algorithms.
Lyricists alarmed by the experiment can take some solace from the fact that humans were needed to come up with the book and lyrics. They have been provided by the writer and actor Nathan Taylor and his husband, composer Benjamin Till, who were behind last year’s Our Gay Wedding: The Musical on Channel 4.
The result will be called Beyond the Fence, set in 1982 when Mary and her daughter George are celebrating one year living at Greenham Common peace camp protesting against the arrival of US cruise missiles. When Mary is faced with losing her child to the authorities she finds an unlikely ally in the shape of US airman Jim Meadows. It becomes, said the team behind the musical, a powerful story about “conviction, unity and love”.
Gale said rehearsals would begin three weeks after Christmas. She said: “It looks like what is coming together is actually something which is quite traditional ... it is not a crazy, avant garde, mad show.” They had been setting out to see what was possible to achieve, she said. “Genuinely, we didn’t know what was going to happen, we didn’t know how it was going to play out.”
People should not be concerned about the rise of computer creativity, Gale said, as it is all about helping humans to better themselves. She said: “It’s like holding up a mirror because when you try to get a system to be creative. It challenges you to ask: ‘How do we do it?’”
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